The First Ones In

A Town Buys a Football Team

The Rockets did not arrive in Charleston the way the Orlando Panthers arrived in Orlando. They were not shipped in from New Jersey by a businessman looking for a new market. They were not moved through three cities and two decades and dropped in the American South by an ownership group in search of a place to land. The Charleston Rockets were built, from the ground up, by the town itself.

The Rockets were incorporated in February 1964 as an expansion club in the United Football League, the Midwestern-based professional football circuit that had launched in 1961. The UFL had eight teams that year: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Quebec, and two clubs from West Virginia. Wheeling had the Ironmen. Charleston had the Rockets.

The ownership group was not a person. It was a community-stockholder corporation — a public offering of shares in the football team, subscribed by residents of the Kanawha Valley. Local money. Working-class money. West Virginia coal-country money. The football team belonged to the town, in the most literal sense a professional football team has ever belonged to a town. When the Rockets won, Charleston won. When the Rockets bought a lineman, Charleston bought a lineman. When the Rockets, in five years' time, could not afford to keep the lights on, it was Charleston that had to make the call.

The first head coach the Rockets hired was Perry Moss. He had quarterbacked the University of Illinois to the 1947 Rose Bowl. He had played briefly for the Green Bay Packers. He had been the head coach of the Montreal Alouettes in the Canadian Football League from 1960 to 1962. He was thirty-eight years old and he was on his way to becoming the winningest coach in the history of the league Charleston had just joined. In 1964 he was coaching a first-year professional football club in West Virginia.

The 1964 Rockets went 11–3 in the UFL. They went 7–0 at Laidley Field. They finished one game behind the Canton Bulldogs for the Western Division title and missed the playoffs by that margin. Their first game in franchise history, played on August 30, 1964, at Laidley Field, ended Charleston 65, Joliet Explorers 7. They scored sixty-five points in their debut.

The United Football League fell apart after that 1964 season. In February 1965, Charleston and Wheeling joined the former Quebec Rifles (now moved to Toronto), the former Indianapolis Warriors (now moved to Fort Wayne), and a group of Atlantic Coast Football League defectors to form a new league. Ten founding clubs. The Continental Football League was announced on February 6, 1965. The Rockets brought the best UFL coach, the best UFL quarterback, and the deepest returning roster in the new circuit. They were, on paper and by every measure that mattered, the favorites.

Laidley Field was where they were going to play the games. A municipal athletic stadium built in downtown Charleston in the 1920s. Cinder track around the field. Concrete grandstands on both sides. Capacity in the neighborhood of ten to eleven thousand. The house the Rockets would call home was not built to be a National Football League cathedral. It was built to be a high school field. It was the stadium a community-owned football team played in because the community had already built it, decades earlier, and it belonged to them too.

Perfection

The Rockets played their first Continental Football League game on July 31, 1965, at J. Fred Johnson Stadium in Kingsport, Tennessee, against the Newark Bears. Neutral-site opener. Kingsport was a Norfolk & Western railroad town in the Appalachian foothills, five hours' drive from Charleston. Five thousand people came to watch. The Rockets won 34–14.

A week later they beat Fort Wayne 30–6 at Laidley Field in front of 8,500 fans. A week after that, they beat Rhode Island 27–16 in Providence. The 1965 Charleston Rockets never really trailed for very long after that.

The final scoreboard is the kind of number that ought to be quoted at the beginning of every professional football history book: fourteen wins, zero losses, four hundred sixty-two points scored, one hundred twenty-nine allowed, a point differential of three hundred thirty-three across a fourteen-game professional football schedule. That is 23.8 points scored per game and 9.2 allowed. In a league of professional football players. In a league whose champion two years later would win a title game 38–14 with a quarterback who threw for 3,446 yards in the regular season. The Rockets were, statistically, one of the most dominant professional football teams of any level, in any year, in the entire 1960s.

Perry Moss's offense ran through Ron Miller at quarterback. Miller, out of Wisconsin, twenty-six years old, threw for 1,866 yards, twenty-one touchdowns, and eleven interceptions with an 81.2 passer rating that would have led most Continental Football League seasons that would come after his. The backfield was Ronnie Quillen at fullback — 130 carries, 514 yards, six rushing touchdowns, and four more through the air — and Millard Fleming at halfback (501 yards rushing, 42 catches). The receiving corps was led by Jim Moss, the West Virginia University tight end who caught thirty passes for seven hundred thirty-five yards and nine touchdowns. Moss's twenty-four and a half yards per catch is the kind of average number that describes an entirely different kind of tight end than the one football has settled on over the sixty years since. He was a downfield weapon, a Charleston kid, and he was playing in front of his neighborhood.

The defense allowed 129 points in fourteen games. Bill Miller and Joe Critchlow anchored the interior. Coy Bacon lined up at right defensive end at six-four and 269 pounds, twenty-two years old, out of Jackson State. Perry Moss put him on the goal line as a jumbo tight end. He caught a touchdown pass that year. He intercepted two other passes and returned one for a touchdown of his own. He would leave Charleston after the season, follow Perry Moss to Orlando for the 1966 Continental season, and reach the Los Angeles Rams of the National Football League in 1968. He would play until 1981 in the NFL, until 1983 in the United States Football League, and put together a fourteen-year professional football career that produced three Pro Bowls, four second-team All-Pro selections, and — by every credible unofficial accounting — one hundred thirty or more career sacks in the years before the National Football League began officially tracking the statistic. He was, in 1965, a Charleston Rocket.

The engine of the 1965 team, though, on both sides of the ball, was a five-foot-ten defensive back and returner from Iowa State named Mike FitzGerald. FitzGerald intercepted six passes. He caught fourteen punts and returned them for 255 yards, including a 92-yard touchdown. He caught ten kickoffs and returned them for 279 yards, averaging 27.9 yards a return, including a 91-yard runback. He caught balls out of the backfield. He scored four touchdowns. He was the most electrifying player in the Continental Football League in its first season and one of the most electrifying players any minor-league football team of the 1960s ever put on the field, and he made his home in Charleston, West Virginia, because that was where the football team he played for made its home.

The Rockets went 14–0. They beat the Philadelphia Bulldogs 58–21 on the road at Temple Stadium in front of 13,239 fans — the largest crowd any Rockets game would draw during the entire five-year franchise history, and it was in someone else's building. They beat Toronto 31–0 in Toronto in September. They beat Rhode Island 63–0 at Laidley Field in October. They beat Fort Wayne 28–3 on the road.

And on the night of November 28, 1965, in front of 7,105 fans at Laidley Field, they beat the Toronto Rifles 24–7 for the first Continental Football League title. Perry Moss had his championship. The community-owned football team had won it all.

Nothing in the story that came after was ever going to be that clean again.

The Return

The 1966 season was the transition. Perry Moss took the Orlando Panthers job the following winter. Coy Bacon went with him. So did a few other pieces of the championship roster. The community stockholders in Charleston replaced Moss with Ken Carpenter, a former first-round Cleveland Browns pick from the 1950 National Football League draft and a capable professional football man. The roster stayed deep. The defending champions started fast: 3–1 out of the gate, three of the four games at home, all three home games wins.

Then came September 18, 1966.

The visiting football team on the field at Laidley Field that afternoon was the Orlando Panthers. The head coach on the visitors' sideline was Perry Moss. The Panthers had moved south from Newark the previous winter and were on their way to a 12–2 debut season and a Continental Football League championship-game appearance of their own. Ten thousand one hundred six fans came to Laidley Field to watch the game. It was the biggest crowd Laidley Field would host during the Rockets' entire Continental Football League run. It was the biggest home crowd the Rockets ever drew, in any season, for any game.

The Panthers won 27–24 in overtime. It was the first home loss in the history of the Charleston Rockets. From the debut game in August 1964 through the middle of September 1966, the Rockets had played eighteen home games and won all eighteen. Perry Moss, the man who had been the head coach for fifteen of those wins, walked back into the building wearing the other team's colors and ended the streak. It happened before the biggest crowd the building had ever held. On the same field where the community-owned club had won its title, ten months earlier, in front of a crowd smaller by nearly three thousand.

The rest of the 1966 season stayed strong on paper. Charleston finished 10–4 in the regular season, second in the Continental Football League's Western Division. In the Western Division playoff on November 26, 1966, they traveled to the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando and lost again to Perry Moss's Panthers, this time 31–24, in front of 7,857 fans. Two weeks later Moss's Panthers lost the Continental Football League championship game 20–17 in overtime to the Philadelphia Bulldogs. Two years later Moss would win another championship, with Orlando, at the Tangerine Bowl, in front of the largest crowd the league would ever produce for a title game.

None of it happened in Charleston. The Rockets had gotten there first, won it all, and were now watching the coach they had launched build a dynasty in a city with warmer weather, better crowds, and more money in the front office.

The Year the Wheels Came Off

The 1967 Continental Football League season is the season the whole thing started coming apart, and the Charleston Rockets were where the coming-apart showed up first.

Ken Carpenter was gone. In his place, the community stockholders promoted from within. Sam Fernandez — the middle linebacker who had started for the 1965 championship team, who had played through 1966, and who had served as an assistant coach in 1966 — took over as head coach. Fernandez was twenty-seven years old. He was, in a professional football league, coaching men who were roughly his own age.

The Rockets went 6–8. It was the first losing season in franchise history. It was also a technicality of a record, because nine of the twenty-two games on the Rockets' 1967 schedule were canceled or rescheduled. Games against Akron were called off twice. Games against Montreal, Toronto, and Wheeling were canceled outright. Games were postponed and moved around the calendar. This is not the schedule of a functioning professional football league. It is the schedule of a league that has begun to lose its own footing.

The quarterback situation reflected the same picture. Fernandez ran five different quarterbacks through the lineup that year, trying to find one who could still play. Sonny Gibbs, the six-foot-seven Texas Christian passer who had spent time with the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL. Eagle Day, thirty-five years old, ex–Ole Miss, a former NFL and CFL quarterback in his final professional season. Benjy Dial, Allen McCune, Ron Miller — Miller was still on the roster three years after his championship year, now sharing the position with four other men. The team that had run one quarterback and one system to a perfect record in 1965 had, by 1967, become a rotating tryout.

Around the league, the picture was not any better. The Continental Football League's 1967 championship game was played at Anaheim Stadium in California in front of 8,730 fans — a lower attendance than the 1966 Rockets home game against Perry Moss's Panthers had drawn a year earlier. Half of the league's other games that year were played in front of crowds of two or three thousand. The Continental Football League had launched in 1965 as an ambitious ten-team professional football circuit. By the end of 1967 it was scrambling to keep its own schedule from collapsing.

The community stockholders in Charleston had lost money in every season the Rockets had played. In 1964, in the UFL, they had lost money. In 1965, the perfect season, the championship season, they had lost money. In 1966, in a 10–4 season with the biggest home crowd in franchise history, they had lost money. In 1967, in a 6–8 season with the schedule falling apart around them, they had lost more money.

In April 1968, the community stockholders held a meeting and voted to dissolve the football team.

Two Thousand Dollars

The Charleston Rockets should have folded in the spring of 1968. They did not.

Fred Haddad was a Charleston businessman who had co-founded a discount department store called Heck's in 1959. Heck's would grow, over the next two decades, into a regional chain of one hundred seventy stores across the Rust Belt and Mid-Atlantic states. In April 1968, with the community stockholders having just voted to shut the football team down, Haddad walked into the room, wrote a check for two thousand dollars, and bought the Charleston Rockets.

He hired Billy Ray Barnes to coach the football team. Barnes was a former Wake Forest running back and a former Pro Bowl fullback for the Philadelphia Eagles, the Dallas Cowboys, and the Minnesota Vikings across seven seasons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was thirty-two years old, still one year past his last game as an NFL player, and he had never before been a head coach at any level of professional football.

The 1968 Rockets went 8–3.

That is not a typo. In eleven games, in a league that was in its final year of existence and would fold within weeks of the season's end, with a first-time head coach, a two-thousand-dollar ownership check, and a roster patched together from what could be found, Billy Ray Barnes coached the Charleston Rockets to an 8–3 record and a third-place finish in the Atlantic Division of the Continental Football League. They opened at home on August 24 against the Ohio Valley Ironmen, drew 8,500 fans to Laidley Field, and lost 21–20 in the last minute. Then they got up and went 8–2 the rest of the way. They beat Michigan 56–14 at Laidley Field. They beat Arkansas 50–13. They beat the same Ohio Valley Ironmen 37–17 in a rematch. The football was outstanding.

The house was not. The 8,500 who came to the opener represented the biggest crowd of the season. Most of the home schedule after that averaged closer to five thousand. Charleston had learned, four seasons in, what the football business teaches every ownership group that runs out ahead of its market: the football does not have to get worse for the audience to shrink. The audience shrinks anyway. The audience shrinks because there are only so many Saturdays in a summer, only so many dollars in a household, only so many years in which a novelty stays a novelty.

The final game in Charleston Rockets history was played on November 9, 1968, at Cashman Field in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Rockets beat the Las Vegas Cowboys 34–6. There were one thousand people in the building. The next weekend's scheduled home game against the Quad-City Raiders was canceled. So was the trip to Oklahoma City the week after that. The Charleston Rockets had played their last snap of professional football.

In January 1969, Fred Haddad withdrew his support. He had run the football team for one season, on his own dime, and he was done. The Rockets suspended operations. The Continental Football League awarded Charleston's slot to a new club in North Jersey called the Jersey Jays.

The Charleston Rockets had lost money in every one of the five seasons they had played professional football. Perry Moss had coached them to a perfect record. Ken Carpenter had coached them to the second round of the playoffs. Sam Fernandez had held together a losing team in a folding league. Billy Ray Barnes had coached them to an 8–3 record in the final year. The football, in every single one of those seasons, had been fine. The football was never the problem in Charleston.

The problem was the gap between what the football cost to produce and what the market could pay to watch it. The community stockholders in Charleston had done what football fans have always done in football towns. They put their money into the pot, they built a team, they won a championship. And after five years the money ran out, because the model had a hole in it that no amount of local pride was going to plug.

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The football was excellent. The football was never the problem in Charleston.

The First Ones In

The First Ones In

Three lines run out of the Charleston Rockets and are still running today.

The first is the football people. Perry Moss won the 1965 title in Charleston, took the Orlando Panthers job the next winter, and coached Orlando to Continental Football League championships in 1967 and 1968. He became the winningest coach in the history of the original league and the only one to win multiple championships with two different franchises. He went on from there to become the offensive coordinator of the Chicago Bears from 1970 through 1973, a pioneer of Arena Football in the late 1980s and 1990s, and eventually the head coach of the Orlando Predators of the Arena Football League, where he went 59–25 over seven seasons. He is a member of the Florida Sports Hall of Fame and the Arena Football Hall of Fame. He died in DeBary, Florida, in August 2014 at the age of eighty-eight. Every step of that resume — every one — started in Charleston in 1964.

Coy Bacon left Charleston with Moss in 1966, played one Continental Football League season in Orlando, signed with the Los Angeles Rams in 1968, and played fourteen years in the National Football League. He was the last member of the Charleston Rockets who was still active in professional football. Billy Ray Barnes went back to Wake Forest and became a college assistant. Mike FitzGerald left for coaching. Sam Fernandez stayed in football. The 1965 Rockets roster produced, in raw talent per capita, one of the most impressive alumni groups any Continental Football League team ever put together.

The second line is the town. Charleston, West Virginia, has been a football town for a hundred years. It was one when the Rockets arrived in 1964. It was one when the Rockets folded in 1969. It was one when Laidley Field hosted a revived version of the Rockets from 1980 through 1982 in the American Football Association. It is one today. The Kanawha Valley — Charleston, the coalfield communities that ring it, and the corridor east toward Beckley and north toward Wheeling — has produced college football players and professional football players for as long as those categories have existed. The Rockets did not build the market. The market was there. The Rockets served it, for five years, at a cost the community stockholders were finally not able to keep paying.

The third line is the lesson. The Charleston Rockets are the first entry on the ledger of the original Continental Football League and the first entry on the ledger of every professional football league that has come since. What Charleston wrote is not a football lesson. It is a business lesson, and it has to be read the way business lessons are read: cold, and once. Undefeated seasons do not fix broken cap tables. Community-stockholder ownership is a beautiful thing on a founding-year business card and a difficult thing at the fifth-year board meeting. Five consecutive years of operating losses will beat any five-year plan. The football was excellent. The football was never the problem. The problem was the shape of the deal underneath the football, and the shape of the deal was the shape of every professional football team in every professional football league that ever had to close a set of books it couldn't balance.

What Comes Next

The Rockets did not just win the first Continental Football League title. They wrote the first cautionary tale.

The new Continental Football League opens its 2027 season with an operating model that has been built, deliberately, against exactly the failure that ended Charleston. Every ownership group brought into the league arrived with a written commitment, a paid deposit, and compliance with league standards on capitalization and reserves before the first game was scheduled. Payroll is matched to actual, projected, defensible revenue — not to aspiration. Media distribution runs through the league's own channels rather than through a national television contract that isn't coming. There is no community-stockholder vote in the spring that decides whether the club opens for the summer. There is no two-thousand-dollar Hail Mary check that has to save the season.

The football will be as real in the Kanawha Valley in 2028 as it was on Laidley Field in 1965. The market never went anywhere. The Rockets left, the Ironmen left, the American Football Association's revived Rockets left, and every one of those departures did the same thing every departure of a professional football team in a football city has ever done: it left the appetite behind. West Virginia and the surrounding Ohio Valley corridor is one of the great football corners of the American map. It is a working-class corner. It is a union corner. It is a corner that has, for a hundred years, watched its neighborhoods produce football players who went on to make an honest living from the game.

Somewhere in the ownership community of the Kanawha Valley — the developers, the coal and gas operators, the health-system executives, the union locals that have carried working communities across the Ohio River for generations, and the families that have built the businesses that anchor Charleston and Huntington and the towns in between — there is a group that can look at the Charleston Rockets' story and see the answer key.

The Rockets went 14–0 in 1965. They won the first Continental Football League championship. They folded in January 1969 not because their football failed, but because their business model did. The new league is being built the other way around. What that means, for a market like Charleston, is that the football that shows up next will not be the football that had to leave.

The Charleston Rockets were the first ones in. They wrote the founding page of the Continental Football League. The book they started is a long way from finished.